Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Fact Check: Social Security Does Not Increase the Deficit
AlterNet | Lynn Stuart Parramore | 11/19/13

The American people love Social Security, and with good reason. It protects seniors and the disabled from poverty, and it is the most important life and disability safeguard available to the nation's 75 million children. The program is a bargain: Its administrative costs are lower than privately managed retirement plans. Social Security returns in benefits more than 99 cents of every dollar collected, whereas a typical 401(k) could easily eat up 20 cents of that dollar in fees. The program is fiscally sound and prudently managed -- a policy triumph.

There are basically two categories of people who want to see Social Security cut: 1) financiers who wish to move us toward privatized retirement accounts so that they can charge us fees; and 2) rich people who do not like to pay taxes. Their main champions are conservatives at the Heritage Foundation, libertarians at the Cato Institute and Wall Street financier Pete Peterson. ... Read more

Why Are Big Retailers Trying to Kill Thanksgiving?
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MotherJones | Josh Harkinson | 11/27/13

In case you haven't noticed, Black Friday isn't just on Friday anymore. The retail industry's high-density mass of starry lights, Santa dioramas, and door-buster shopping deals really ought to be renamed the Black Hole--it just keeps sucking up everything around it. That holiday known as Thanksgiving? Pretty much gone. Especially if you work for one of the nation's largest retailers. ... Read more

17-Year-Old Boy in Coma, Fighting for Life After Texas Cop Tasered Him For Breaking Up a School Fight
AlterNet | Jodie Gummow | 11/29/13

... Noe Nino de Rivera, had successfully stepped in to break up a fight between two girls at Cedar Creek High School when school officials called in Randy McMillan, a Bastrop County sheriff department deputy. McMillan told the boy to step back and the teen obliged, with his hands in the air.

Yet, in a vicious act of police brutality, McMillan tasered the boy anyway, who fell onto his face and was knocked unconscious. Rather than calling for emergency medical assistance, the cop put the comatose boy in handcuffs. ... Read more

Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers'
HP | Ryan Grim | 11/26/13

The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as "exemplars" of how "personal vulnerabilities" can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority. ... Read more

UMich Consumer Confidence "Recovers" - Hovers At 10-Month Lows
ZeroHedge | author | 11/27/13

Unlike every other measure of consumer confidence, sentiment, or comfort, the 'final' UMich Consumer Confidence print recovered its "flash" collapse and managed to beat expectations. However, before the party streamers are broken out, this uptick leaves the confidence data the 2nd lowest since Jan 2013 ... Read more
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Speed Traders Meet Nightmare on Elm Street With Nanex
Bloomberg | Michael P. Regan | 11/26/13

The nemesis of Wall Street's high-frequency traders operates out of an apartment-sized office above the Bliss Salon -- manicure/pedicure $45 -- on Elm Street in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka.

Staring at four computer monitors,Eric Scott Hunsader, the founder of market-data provider Nanex LLC, looks for hints of illicit trading hidden in psychedelic images of triangles dancing with dots that represent quotes to buy and sell U.S. stocks broken down by the millisecond.

To Hunsader, the images created from market feeds are evidence of high-frequency trading firms exploiting market rules to turn a profit in a lawless environment. Though others in the industry see his reports and charts as propaganda, Nanex's interpretations are helping to drive the public debate about the fundamental fairness of the modern stock market. ... Read more

Fed Reveals New Concerns About Long-Term U.S. Slowdown
Bloomberg | Rich Miller | 11/27/13

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues are suffering through their own form of cognitive dissonance: revealing new concerns about the economy's long-term prospects even as they forecast faster growth in 2014.

BB | Fed Reveals New Concerns About Long-Term U.S. Slowdown (11/27/13) [48:56]

These Photos Of Female Heroin Addicts Reveal The Power Of Addiction
HP | author | 11/25/13

Most often, addiction and the struggles that accompany it stay hidden behind closed doors. Yet in 1997, photographer Lincoln Clarkes explored the streets and alleyways of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, capturing and exposing the images of over 400 female heroin addicts over the course of five years. ... Read more

Intelligence Officials Fret Over Snowden's 'Doomsday' Cache of NSA Documents
AlterNet | Alex Kane | 11/26/13

Does whistleblower Edward Snowden have a secret cache of National Security Agency documents? U.S. and British intelligence officials now say he does. They claim that "the worst is yet to come" from Snowden.

Reuters reports that intelligence officials claim that there exists a "doomsday" cache of secret documents hidden on an Internet data cloud. The heavily protected crop of documents allegedly includes the names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel. The data cloud is protected by encryption and multiple passwords. The material is allegedly separate from the other documents Snowden gave to journalists. ... Read more

Spies worry over "doomsday" cache stashed by ex-NSA contractor Snowden
Reuters | Mark Hosenball | 11/25/13

British and U.S. intelligence officials say they are worried about a "doomsday" cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud.

The cache contains documents generated by the NSA and other agencies and includes names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel, seven current and former U.S. officials and other sources briefed on the matter said. ... Read more

How Wall Street Turned America Into Incarceration Nation
AlterNet | Les Leopold | 11/25/13

The U.S. leads the world in prisoners with 2.27 million in jail and more than 4.8 million on parole. Minorities have been especially hard hit, forming 39.4% of the prison population, with one in three black men expected to serve time during their lifetimes.   How is it that our land, supposedly the beacon of freedom and democracy for the rest of the world, puts so many of its own people into prison?

We usually attribute the prisoner increase to a combination of overt racism and Nixon's war on drugs, followed by Rockefeller's "three strikes" legislation in New York, and then the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act with its mandatory sentences. While racism and these laws certainly provide ample opportunity to incarcerate millions for violating senseless prohibition laws, they do not tell the whole story. ... Read more

The Government's Secret Plan to Shut Off Cellphones and the Internet, Explained
MotherJones | Dana Liebelson | 11/26/13

This month, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Department of Homeland Security must make its plan to shut off the internet and cellphone communications available to the American public. You, of course, may now be thinking: What plan?! Though President Barack Obama swiftly disapproved of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak turning off the internet in his country (to quell widespread civil disobedience) in 2011, the US government has the authority to do the same sort of thing, under a plan that was devised during the George W. Bush administration. Many details of the government's controversial "kill switch" authority have been classified, such as the conditions under which it can be implemented and how the switch can be used. But thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), DHS has to reveal those details by December 12--or mount an appeal. (The smart betting is on an appeal, since DHS has fought to release this information so far.) Yet here's what we do know about the government's "kill switch" plan: ... Read more

Thanksgiving Storm Leads To Hundreds Of Flight Cancellations
HP | Ramit Plushnick-Masti | 11/24/13

A large storm already blamed for at least eight deaths in the West slogged through Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest on Sunday, leading to hundreds of flight cancellations as it slowly churned east ahead of Thanksgiving.

After the storm plows through the Southwest, meteorologists expect the Arctic mass to head south and east, threatening plans for Tuesday and Wednesday as people hit the roads and airports for some of the busiest travel days of the year. ... Read more

The War Within: Treating PTSD
60 Minutes | author | 11/24/13

We've seen a lot of stories about veterans and post-traumatic stress disorder but tonight, for the first time, we're able to show you new therapies that are changing the lives of vets and their families. Two million Americans have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Veterans Administration tells us that one out of five suffers from PTSD. One reason we're seeing so much of it is because many of our troops have been ordered on combat tours three, four or even five times. The VA overwhelmed by the need, decided to try new treatments that were originally designed for rape victims. ... Read more

Fukushima's crippled reactors: the risky plan to move fuel rods
CBC World | Craig Dale | 11/19/13

The thousands of people who punch in every day at what is arguably the world's most dangerous workplace are accustomed to facing risks.   But now workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have embarked on their most precarious operation since the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami triggered meltdowns and explosions at the facility.

On Monday, select crews from Tokyo Electric Power Company began removing hundreds of radioactive fuel rods from a cooling pool inside a rickety reactor building, a job that is unprecedented in scale, and where one wrong move could have disastrous consequences.

... "They need to be handled extremely carefully and closely monitored. You should never rush or force them out, or they may break. I'm much more worried about this than I am about contaminated water." ... Read more

4 Ways the Koch Brothers' Wealth Is Beyond Comprehension
AlterNet | Paul Buchheit | 11/24/13

In 2012, David and Charles Koch made enough money in one second to pay the food bill for an entire year for a homeless woman named Beverly

... If Beverly is approved for food stamps, she'll get about $1.50 per meal. David and Charles Koch made enough in one second at the office in 2012 to pay her food bill for an entire year. ... Read more

5 Powerful Videos on Factory Farming
onegreenplanet.org | author | Recent

By now, most of us know that factory farming is a monstrous problem -- for the environment, the animals, and those working in these facilities.   Over 10 billion land animals are killed for food in the U.S. every year -- a frightening statistic that is expected to increase with population numbers if nothing is done.

Slaughter numbers are staggering, but the way the system runs is even more disturbing. Anyone who has seen undercover footage of the animal abuse, toxic waste, and read or heard stories of factory farm workers know that these facilities are not fit for anyone. ... Read more

The Corporate Bully Whose Front Groups, Willful Distortions and Hate-Mongering Has Poisoned U.S. Politics?: Meet Richard Berman
AlterNet | Steven Rosenfeld | 11/24/13

"Why don't we know who one of the most powerful people in America is? What he has done? Why '60 Minutes' called him Dr. Evil?" asks Saru Jayaraman, a leader in a growing national movement of restaurant workers demanding better pay and working conditions.

Dr. Evil is Richard Berman, a Washington-based lawyer-turned-hitman for Big Food who pioneered and still deploys many of the most intentionally deceptive, inflammatory and anti-democratic tactics used in corporate propaganda campaigns today. For nearly four decades, Berman's attacks have tried to smear, discredit and destroy public-interest causes and groups by a toxic brew of industry front groups, distortion-filled attacks, ridicule and bullying to stoke prejudice and hatred as a means of turning the public's attention and regulators away from his paymasters' business practices. ... Read more

Todd Gitlin: How to Reverse the Slow-Motion Climate Change Apocalypse
AlterNet | Todd Gitlin |11/21/13

Why the divestment movement against big energy is so important.

Slow-motion, however, is not no-motion. In fits and starts, speeding up and slowing down, turning risks into clumps of extreme fact, one catastrophe after another -- even if there can be no 100% certitude about the origin of each one -- the planetary future careens toward the unlivable. That future is, it seems, arriving ahead of schedule, though erratically enough that most people -- in the lucky, prosperous countries at any rate -- can still imagine the planet conducting something close to business as usual. ... Read more

12 Ways JP Morgan Admitted It Ripped Off Americans to the Tune of Billions
AlterNet | Steven Rosenfeld | 11/20/13

Wall Street's latest chapter in corporate accountability is hardly satisfying, even if it is a rare admission of wrongdoing from a major bank. On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced a $13 billion settlement with J.P. Morgan for its rapacious role in the housing market bubble and collapse.

Beyond analyses showing that the government's supposed largest fine ever might end up " closer to $2.74 billion," and that $7 billion of it is tax deductible -- tantamount to America's 138 million taxpayers each giving a $50 bill to Morgan ...

TPP - A Corporate Coup in Disguise
AlterNet | Jim Hightower | 10/01/13 older

This is a super-sized NAFTA, the 1994 trade scam rammed through Congress by the entire corporate establishment. NAFTA promised the "glories of globalization": prosperity across our land. Unfortunately, corporations got the gold. We got the shaft -- thousands of factories closed, millions of middle-class jobs went south, and the economies of hundreds of towns and cities were shattered.

Twenty years later, the gang that gave us NAFTA is back with the TPP, a "trade deal" that mostly does not deal with trade. Of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters! The other chapters amount to a devilish "partnership" for corporate protectionism: ...

Three Charts Explain Why Democrats Went Nuclear on the Filibuster
MotherJones | Kevin Drum | 11/22/13

No one has completely clean hands when it comes to filibusters in the Senate. Democrats have used them and Republicans have used them. But hoo boy, Republicans sure have used them more. That's why Democrats went nuclear on Thursday. Three charts tell the story. ... Read more

The Real Conspiracy Behind the JFK Assassination
MotherJones | David Corn | 11/22/13

... Like many late-year boomers, I grew up fascinated by the speculation, poring over the latest "revelations" and initially believing the worst--at one point, when I was 13, my best friend and I called Parkland Hospital in Dallas and asked to be connected to the wing where the supposedly still-alive Kennedy was being housed--but I came to conclude that much of the conspiracy-mongering was bunk. In Slate, Fred Kaplan does an excellent job chronicling his own similar trajectory, so I won't detail my conversion. But as I spent more time investigating and reporting national security matters, I came to the realization that government officials, spies, and operatives tend not to be sufficiently competent to pull off the murder of a president (with a well-placed patsy as the fall guy!) and then mount a subsequent and wildly effective cover-up. Still, I've resisted getting drawn too far into the Kennedy conspiracy debates--a true black hole. But if you're asking, I do believe that Kennedy was likely killed as the result of underhanded alliances and government misdeeds. It's just that what transpired was more nuanced than a CIA-Mafia-Castro-Soviet-Lyndon-Johnson plot. ... Read more

Who Buys the Spies? The Hidden Corporate Cash Behind America's Out-of-Control National Surveillance State
Bill Moyers | Thomas Ferguson | 10/23/13

Long before President Obama kicked off his 2008 campaign, many Americans took it for granted that George W. Bush's vast, sprawling national security apparatus needed to be reined in. For Democrats, many independents and constitutional experts of various persuasions, Vice President Dick Cheney's notorious doctrine of the "unitary executive" (which holds that the president controls the entire executive branch), was the ultimate statement of the imperial presidency. It was the royal road to easy (or no) warrants for wiretaps, sweeping assertions of the government's right to classify information secret, and arbitrary presidential power. When Mitt Romney embraced the neoconservatives in the 2012 primaries, supporters of the president often cited the need to avoid a return to the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld National Security State as a compelling reason for favoring his reelection. Reelect President Obama, they argued, or Big Brother might be back. ... Read more

What Wal-Mart Could Learn From Henry Ford
Bill Moyers | Robert Reich's blog. | 11/18/13

Wal-Mart just reported shrinking sales for a third straight quarter. What's going on? Explained William S. Simon, the CEO of Wal-Mart, referring to the company's customers, "their income is going down while food costs are not. Gas and energy prices, while they're abating, I think they're still eating up a big piece of the customer's budget."

Wal-Mart's CEO gets it. Most of Walmart's customers are still in the Great Recession, grappling with stagnant or declining pay. So, naturally, Wal-Mart's sales are dropping.   But what Wal-Mart's CEO doesn't get is that a large portion of Walmart's customers are lower-wage workers who are working at places like … Walmart. And Walmart, not incidentally, refuses to raise its median wage (including its army of part-timers) of $8.80 an hour. Read more

What You Need to Know About Fukushima
Bill Moyers | John Light | 11/18/13

All eyes are on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as major cleanup efforts are set to begin later this month, in the most significant test of the operator's ability to manage the threats resulting from one of the biggest nuclear disasters ever. For two years now, the plant's operator and the Japanese government have struggled to contain an ongoing series of crises at the devastated facility. But the situation has the potential to get worse. Here's what you need to know. ...

... Nuclear facilities in Japan lie near 14 active fault lines; Tepco's Fukushima facilities are along five. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) says the utilities are capable of withstanding another earthquake. But last month, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki expressed his fears that further damage to the Fukushima facility could prove catastrophic. "Three out of the four plants were destroyed in the earthquake and in the tsunami. The fourth one has been so badly damaged that the fear is, if there's another earthquake of a seven or above, that building will go and then all hell breaks loose."

The Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo said earlier this year that there's a 70 percent chance a 7.0-magnitude or higher quake will strike Tokyo, near Fukushima, by 2016. Should the fourth reactor collapse, Suzuki said, it would be "bye bye Japan," and "everybody on the west coast of North America should evacuate. Now if that isn't terrifying, I don't know what is." ... Read more

Why Does the Media Ignore Timothy Geithner's Disastrous Leadership of the NY Fed?
TRNN | William K. Black | 11/18/13

Remember nine months ago when Timothy Geithner assured us that it was "extremely unlikely" he would take a position on Wall Street?   The media meme when Geithner announced that he was stepping down as Treasury Secretary and taking a position as a "senior fellow" with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was what a superior human he was for not taking a job with Wall Street. The "extremely unlikely" (to no one's surprise) was announced nine months later. The private equity firm Warburg Pincus has hired Geithner as its President. ... Read more

US Ranks 43rd in the World on Climate Policy (and Canada is Even Worse)
MotherJones | Chris Mooney | 11/20/13

Recently, there's been some good news when it comes to US greenhouse gas emissions: They're actually going down. The bad news, though, is that despite this progress, we still only rank 43rd in the world for the overall effectiveness of our climate policies. ...
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Obama Administration Maps Out Detour Around HealthCare.gov
HP | Jeffrey Young | 11/19/13

People interested in buying health insurance under Obamacare could soon skip the HealthCare.gov website and apply for coverage and financial assistance directly with private insurance companies and online brokers, the Obama administration said Tuesday, in its latest effort to work around the faulty website.

These insurance issuers and brokers are about to get what they want. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is close to providing insurers with the technological capability to also take subsidy applications, as well as sell plans to customers, spokeswoman Julie Bataille said during a conference call with reporters Tuesday. ... Read more

The American Model Of "Growth": Overbuilding And Poaching
ZeroHedge | author | 11/19/13

The rising Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other simulacra of "growth" are masking the real model of growth in America: overbuilding and poaching, as in poaching customers and sales from competitors.

No matter how many outlets a company has, there's always room for a few hundred more somewhere. Now that there's a Starbucks on every corner, you might think the opportunities for expansion are limited. No way--now there are Starbucks in bookstores, Safeway supermarkets, subway stations (BART), etc. ... Read more

A Daring Swiss Bid to Stomp Out CEO Pay Excess
Bill Moyer | Sam Pizzigati | 11/19/13

Something astounding is happening in Switzerland. For the first time ever, voters in a modern developed nation are going to be voting on whether to create what amounts to a "maximum wage."   The vote will come Sunday, November 24, on a ballot initiative that bans any Swiss corporate executive compensation that runs over 12 times worker pay.

In effect, under this "1:12 Initiative for Fair Pay," no Swiss company would be able to pay its top executives more in a month than the company's lowest-paid workers make in a year. ... Read more

How Washington D.C. Is Sucking The Life Out Of America
ZeroHedge | author | 11/19/13

Ever since I started writing about what is happening in the world around me, my primary theme has been that the root cancer at the core of the U.S., and indeed global economy, is cronyism and an absence of the rule of law when it comes to oligarchs. In the U.S., this cronyism is best described as an insidious relationship between large multi-national corporations and big government to funnel all of the wealth and resources of the nation to themselves at the expense of everyone else. In a genuine free market defined by heightened competition and governed by an equal application of the rule of law to all, the 0.1% does not aggregate all of a nation's wealth. This sort of thing only happens in crony capitalism, which is basically nothing more than complete and total insider deals to aggregate newly created money into the hands of the few. ... Read more

How a Shadowy Network of Corporate Front Groups Distorts the Marketplace of Ideas
Bill Moyer | Joshua Holland | 11/19/13

In 1971, Lewis Powell, who would become a Supreme Court justice the following year, penned a memo calling on the American business community to aggressively engage in shaping the country's political discourse and regulatory landscape. The "American economic system is under broad attack," he wrote. He said the time had come to fight back. "Business must learn . . . that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination -- without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business." ... Read more

How much did HealthCare.gov cost?
WashingtonPost | Glenn Kessler | 11/19/13

Some weeks ago, we wrote a column examining the cost of developing the troubled HealthCare.gov Web site. We said we would keep updating it as more information emerged. The most recent figure we had, courtesy of congressional testimony by Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, was $174 million, as of the end of August.

A reader e-mailed that it was time for an update, as Politico had reported that an official at the Government Accountability Office has testified before Congress that the figure actually was "north of $600 million."   That seemed a big difference. So we decided to investigate. ... ... Now the figue seems to be closer to $318 million ... Read more

Obamacare: The Biggest Insurance Scam in History
Truth0out.org | Margaret Flowers | 10/30/13

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also called "Obamacare," may be the biggest insurance scam in history. The industries that profit from our current health care system wrote the legislation, heavily influenced the regulations and have received waivers exempting them from provisions in the law. This has all been done to protect and enhance their profits.

... Sadly, most Americans are being manipulated into supporting the ACA and do not even know they are being bamboozled. That is how scams work. Even after the con is completed, victims do not know they have been manipulated and ripped off. They may even feel good about being scammed, thinking they made a deal when they really had their bank accounts picked. But it is the insurance companies that are the realizing windfall profits from the Obamacare con even as it falters. ... Read more

The Gospel of Selfishness in American Christianity
AlterNet | Amanda Marcotte | 11/14/13

How the philosophers of selfishness came to use Christianity as their cover story.

Anyone who has worked in the restaurant business will be happy to tell you that waiters always fight each other to avoid working Sunday lunch shift. Not because they want to sleep in, but because it's a widespread belief that the post-church crowd is loud, demanding and unwilling to tip appropriately. In the food service industry, "Christian" is synonymous with "selfish.
Bill Maher New Rules - When Did Christian Values Change From Love Thy Neighbor to F*ck Off & Die
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Elizabeth Warren: Don't cut Social Security. Expand it!
WashingtonPost | Greg Sargent | 11/18/13

If Elizabeth Warren is emerging as a kind of spokeswoman for the new economic populism that many Democratic activists want the party to embrace heading into 2014 and 2016, this speech that Warren is currently delivering on the floor of the Senate suggests the push to expand Social Security could become a key issue in the argument over the Democratic Party of the future.

In remarks Warren just began delivering, she strongly endorsed the push to boost Social Security benefits -- in keeping with Senator Tom Harkin's proposal to do the same -- and condemned the "Chained CPI" that liberals fear Dems will embrace in strong terms. From the prepared remarks: ... Read more

Tim Geithner is cashing in
WashingtonPost | Neil Irwin | 11/18/13

Tim Geithner, apparently now tanned and rested after a long six years of financial crisis, is going back to work. The former Treasury secretary and New York Fed chief will be president and managing director of Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm.

The brickbats are flying fast. Here are examples from Ryan Grim and Noam Scheiber that go beyond the standard-issue Twitter snark. The critique boils down to: Of course Tim Geithner is going to make millions in the private equity business. He has always been a creature of the financial industry, carrying its water in government. And now the financial industry is, in effect, repaying him. Future treasury secretaries will know the lucrative fate the awaits them if they are similarly cooperative with Wall Street mandarins. And the circle of life continues. ... Read more

Insight: As U.S. default threatened, banks took extraordinary steps
Reuters | David Henry | 11/19/13

As the United States threatened to default on its debt last month, major U.S. banks set up war rooms, spent many millions of dollars on contingency planning and, in some cases, even prepared to underwrite federal government benefits.

In a series of interviews with top bank executives, new details emerged about the extent of the contingency planning that was undertaken before and during the 16-day government shutdown and as a potential default loomed.

The planning for worst-case scenarios didn't come cheap. JPMorgan alone has spent more than $100 million on contingency planning for U.S. budget crises in recent years including this one, sources close to the bank say. It has reviewed and analyzed thousands of trading contracts, updated computer systems to handle fiscal emergencies, hired consultants, and built new models to figure out what might happen to securities prices. .... Read more

JPMorgan's Fruitful Ties to a Member of China's Elite
NYTimes | David Barboza | 11/13/13

To promote its standing in China, JPMorgan Chase turned to a seemingly obscure consulting firm run by a 32-year-old executive named Lily Chang.   Ms. Chang's firm, which received a $75,000-a-month contract from JPMorgan, appeared to have only two employees. And on the surface, Ms. Chang lacked the influence and public name recognition needed to unlock business for the bank.

But what was known to JPMorgan executives in Hong Kong, and some executives at other major companies, was that "Lily Chang" was not her real name. It was an alias for Wen Ruchun, the only daughter of Wen Jiabao, who at the time was China's prime minister, with oversight of the economy and its financial institutions.

JPMorgan's link to Ms. Wen -- which came during a time when the bank also invested in companies tied to the Wen family -- has not been previously reported. Yet a review by The New York Times of confidential documents, Chinese public records and interviews with people briefed on the contract shows that the relationship pointed to a broader strategy for accumulating influence in China: Put the relatives of the nation's ruling elite on the payroll. ... Read more

Geithner to Join Private Equity Firm
NYTimes | Michael J. De La Merced |11/16/13

Timothy F. Geithner will join the private equity firm Warburg Pincus as president, the firm announced on Saturday. It would be his first prominent position since leaving office as Treasury secretary this year. ... Read more

The People Can Defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership
TRNN News | Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers | 11/15/13

Time to end the failed experiment with rigged corporate trade and put in place fair trade for the people and planet before profits

Momentum is growing in the campaign to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yesterday, the TPP was dealt two blows. Each could be lethal but the TPP, and its Atlantic counterpart, called TAFTA, are not dead yet. It is time for the movement of movements that formed to oppose the TPP to stand in solidarity, defeat these agreements and end the era of rigged corporate trade.

Yesterday's first blow came from Wikileaks, showing once again that when government works in secret with big corporations, exposure by whistle blowers is critical to changing the corrupt direction of government and the economy. ... Read more

These Beautiful "Place-Hacking" Photos Will Give You an Adrenaline Rush

Forth Rail Bridge, Scotland. All photos by Bradley Garrett/eyevine/zReportage. Read more

Dick Cheney Is An Even Bigger Monster Than You Thought
AlterNet | Joan Walsh | 11/15/13

That's not surprising: Cheney is a troll who maligns the president whenever he can, and piling on with Clinton is a special kind of fun. Yes, it's outrageous that a man who has enjoyed many millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded medical care doesn't give a damn about the uninsured in our society, but that's Dick Cheney.

Still, I was a little startled to hear the former vice president express total indifference to questions about his heart donor in a revealing interview on Politicking with Larry King ( it airs Thursday night; here's a clip). It's a window into his utter entitlement and self-absorption, and he comes off as an even bigger monster than I'd thought. Most people would at least feign interest in the donor; Cheney can't manage it. ... Read more
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If Only Right-Wing Christians Knew Where Their Ideas Came From
AlterNet | Ira Chernus | 11/12/13

The media spotlight has focused on the growing split in the Republican Party between its corporate-business wing and the libertarian-leaning Tea Partiers. But what about the third leg of the GOP tripod, the one that used to get all the attention: the evangelical Christian religious right? That's where the spotlight ought to be. ...

... Many politically active evangelicals are happy to be Tea Partiers and align with the libertarian call for smaller government. They see government as a force imposing its secular ways upon them. And Tea Party politicians have been equally happy to talk the religious right talk because it wins them votes. ... Read more

ALEC Floats Legislation Chipping Away At The 17th Amendment
HP | Amanda Terkel | 11/15/13

ALEC circulates model legislation to state legislators, and its bills have resulted in states passing laws related to voter ID, so-called Stand Your Ground issues and the elimination or reduction of state income taxes. ...

... The bill would significantly increase the role of the state legislature in the election of U.S. senators, inching back toward the process used prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913. The 17th Amendment established the direct election of U.S. senators. Before this amendment, senators were chosen by state legislators. ... Read more

Chase Isn't the Only Bank in Trouble
RollingStone | Matt Taibbi | 11/05/13

There are multiple scandals blowing up right now, including a whole set of ominous legal cases that could result in punishments so extreme that they might significantly alter the long-term future of the financial services sector. As one friend of mine put it, "Whatever those morons put aside for settlements, they'd better double it."

Firstly, there's a huge mess involving possible manipulation of the world currency markets. This scandal is already drawing comparisons to the last biggest-financial-scandal-in-history (the Financial Times wondered about a "repeat Libor scandal"), the manipulation of interest rates via the gaming of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. The foreign exchange or FX market is the largest financial market in the world, with a daily trading volume of nearly $5 trillion. ... Read more

Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Freaky New World Order of International Treaties
truthdig.com | Peter Z. Scheer | 11/13/13

WikiLeaks blew open the secret negotiations behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement on Wednesday, releasing draft text that looks good for big corporations and bad for ordinary people.

The TPP is an existing treaty that could be expanded -- with new rules -- to cover as many as 13 countries and as much as 40 percent of the world's GDP. The scary thing about international agreements like this one is that they make local fights moot. Did you sign a petition to stop SOPA or PIPA? Too bad. The TPP would obviate those proposed U.S. laws. ... Read more

How the Stock Market Is Rigged, According to a Robo-Trading Whistleblower
motherboard.vice.com | Alec Liu | 11/14/13

"If you're on Wall Street, you would just assume that you're being ripped off, unless you were the one doing the ripping off," says Dave Lauer, who has helped build robotic systems at top firms like Citadel.

This is the opening of The Wall Street Code, a new documentary on the mysterious and sometimes incomprehensible world of high frequency trading produced by Backlight, a Dutch public broadcasting company. The focus of the documentary isn't on Lauer, who has testified as an expert at a Senate Committee Hearing on HFT, but on Haim Bodek, a "genius" algorithm architect who dared to break Wall Street's notorious omerta, the industry's unwritten rule of silence and secrecy. ... Read more

Flash-Crash Story Looks More Like a Fairy Tale
Bloomberg | Mark Buchanan | 05/07/12

Two years after the frightening spring day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost and regained about 600 points in a matter of minutes, we still don't really know why. This is a problem, because it means something similar -- or worse -- could happen again.

... The actual crisis struck in the three minutes between 2:41 p.m. and 2:44 p.m., when the market fell another 5 percent to 6 percent. Hunsader's analysis suggests this plunge was caused by high-frequency traders. They typically act as liquidity providers, standing ready to buy and sell at certain price levels. But the day's volatility prompted them to dump their holdings to avoid losses. ... Read about the Flash Crash

Ladydrawers - Zoned: The Mysterious "Foreign-Trade Zones" Outposts Inside the USA
truth-out.org | Anne Elizabeth Moore | 11/12/13

Lets look at the wacky world of Foreign-Trade Zones and the labor problems they foster. Despite their rampant growth in recent years, few know they exist. However, they contribute greatly to the annual gross domestic product - and the global garment trade.
Read more

Diabetes Kills One Person Every Six Seconds, New Estimates Show
Bloomberg | Albertina Torsoli | 11/14/13

Diabetes kills one person every six seconds and afflicts 382 million people worldwide, according to the International Diabetes Federation, which has been canvassing the help of people ranging from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to Bob Marley's nephew to raise awareness about the problem.

The number of diabetes cases has climbed 4.4 percent over the past two years, according to new figures the Brussels-based federation released today. The number of people affected by the disease is expected to climb 55 percent to 592 million by 2035 as factors including poor diet, a more sedentary lifestyle, increases in obesity and life expectancy fuel an epidemic, it said. There were only 285 million sufferers worldwide in 2009. ... Read more

South African farmers and scientists suggest the only way to save the endangered rhino is to legalise trade in the animal's horn. (06/13/12) [8:33]

Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks Stir House Bipartisan Opposition
HP | Zach Carter | 11/12/13

Separate groups of House Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday condemned the Obama administration's proposed sweeping free trade agreement with 11 Pacific nations, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

... Critics of the Trans-Pacific deal have warned that it would undermine Internet freedom and consumer protections in the U.S. and abroad. But the letters take issue with the process for approving the deal, demanding greater congressional input, rather than singling out specific policy complaints. ...

... "Under Fast Track, the executive branch is empowered to sign trade agreements before Congress has an opportunity to vote on them, and then unilaterally write legislation making the pacts' terms U.S. federal law," reads a letter from 22 House Republicans. "Fast Track allows the president to send these executive branch-authored bills directly to the floor for a vote under rules forbidding all floor amendments and limiting debate. ... We do not agree to cede our constitutional authority to the executive." ... Read more

*Wealth Inequality in America [6:25]

You Will Be Shocked at How Ignorant Americans Really Are
AlterNet | Marty Kaplan | 11/02/13

If you think the widening chasm between the rich and the rest spells trouble for American democracy, have a look at the growing gulf between the information-rich and-poor.

Earlier this year, a Harvard economist’s jaw-dropping study of American’s beliefs about the distribution of American wealth became a viral video (see video above). Now a new Pew study of the distribution of American news consumption is just as flabbergasting.

... Pew sliced the TV news audience into thirds: heavy, medium and light. In my Jeffersonian fantasy, that distribution would look like a bell curve; in fact, it looks like a cliff. Heavy viewers watch a little over two hours of TV news a day, but medium viewers barely watch a quarter of an hour and light viewers average only two minutes a day. The top third of the country does 88 percent of the day’s TV news viewing; the middle third watches only 10 percent of the total time; the bottom third sees just 2 percent of the minutes of news consumed. ... Read more

Chef Roy Choi Soups Up Instant Ramen With American Cheese
Click to view

In his new cookbook, L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food, chef Roy Choi of L.A.'s famous Kogi taco truck (among a slew of other popular restaurants) shares this souped-up instant ramen recipe that will forever change the way you look at your 2 a.m. college dinner (or 2 p.m. breakfast).

"Making instant ramen is spiritual, important and methodical for Korean-American kids," Choi tells Tasting Table. "It's our peanut butter and jelly sandwich." Read more

Former Fed Quantitative Easer Confesses, Apologizes: "I Can Only Say: I'm Sorry, America"
ZeroHedge | author | 11/12/13

"I can only say: I'm sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed's first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing.... We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing... The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.... Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets. As for the rest of America, good luck..... The implication is that the Fed is dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington's dysfunction. But the Fed is at the center of that dysfunction. Case in point: It has allowed QE to become Wall Street's new "too big to fail" policy." ... Read more

Meet Your Taxpayer-Subsidized Farm Bill Billionaires!
HP | Jason Linkins | 11/11/13

When most people think about farm subsidies, chances are they do not immediately think "massive taxpayer money boondoggle that should be cut from the federal budget immediately." They've probably heard about how hard it is out there for small family farmers, doing honest work in the world, keeping everyone fed and maintaining our institutional repository of agricultural practices. Surely, these subsidies are helping to keep an important way of life alive for the True Sons of Soil and Toil ... like, say, multi-billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Reps. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.) and Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) both cited the Bible last week to argue that while individual Christians have a responsibility to feed the poor, the federal government does not.   Yet both men's farms have received millions in federal assistance, according to the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit that advocates for more conservation and fewer subsidies. LaMalfa's family rice farm has received more than $5 million in commodity subsidies since 1995, according to the group's analysis of data from the U.S. Agriculture Department, while Fincher's farm has received more than $3 million since then. ... Read more

According to the November 5, 2013 U.S. Drought Monitor, moderate to exceptional drought covers 32.2% of the contiguous United States, a decrease from last week's 34.7%. However, the worst drought categories (extreme to exceptional drought) increased slightly from 2.8% last week to 2.9%. ... Click to zoom
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Guns & Ammo Editor's Hope For "Healthy Exchange of Ideas" Costs Him His Job
Slate | Josh Voorhees | 11/07/13

Guns & Ammo editor Jim Bequette says he was hoping to generate a "healthy exchange of ideas on gun rights" when he decided to publish a column that veered ever-so slightly from the the usual from-my-cold-dead-hands rhetoric normally found in the pages of his magazine. It's safe to say that effort didn't go exactly as he had hoped.

After a swift and vocal backlash from readers and other Second Amendment enthusiasts, Bequette announced yesterday that he was stepping down immediately, and that the magazine was also cutting ties with the author of the piece in question, contributing editor Dick Metcalf. "I made a mistake by publishing the column," Bequette wrote in an apologetic letter to readers. "I thought it would generate a healthy exchange of ideas on gun rights. I miscalculated, pure and simple. I was wrong, and I ask your forgiveness." ... Read more
Original article

A Malaysian Businessman Allegedly Traded Hookers and Lady Gaga Tickets for Navy Secrets
Slate | Dan Gartland | 11/04/13

The Associated Press brings us the latest details on a wide-ranging Navy corruption case that first came to light last month. Hookers? Check. Lady Gaga tickets? Check. A stage performance of The Lion King? Check.

Based on the court documents the AP got a look at it's unclear whether prosecutors are building a case against U.S. Navy officer Michael Vannak Khem Misiewicz and Leonard Francis, a big-spending Malaysian defense contractor known as "Fat Leonard," or simply trying to create the greatest SEO line of all time. ... Read more

Hillary's Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren
newrepublic.com | Noam Scheiber | 11/10/13

We're three years from the next presidential election, and Hillary Clinton is, once again, the inevitable Democratic nominee. Congressional Republicans have spent months investigating her like she already resides in the White House.

... On one side is a majority of Democratic voters, who are angrier, more disaffected, and altogether more populist than they've been in years. They are more attuned to income inequality than before the Obama presidency and more supportive of Social Security and Medicare.1 They've grown fonder of regulation and more skeptical of big business.2 A recent Pew poll showed that voters under 30--who skew overwhelmingly Democratic--view socialism more favorably than capitalism. Above all, Democrats are increasingly hostile to Wall Street and believe the government should rein it in. ...

... A Clinton-Warren matchup would have all sorts of consequences, none of them especially heartwarming. The most immediate is that Warren would probably lose. Though Warren has been boning up on a variety of policy areas in periodic dinners with experts--she told me there are several issues beyond Wall Street "we need to have frank conversations" about without naming specifics--she remains a work in progress as a politician. She is still pedestrian in front of a crowd despite her strengths as a questioner and debater, and her Senate campaign last year was bumpier than it should have been. At this stage in their careers, Clinton is simply easier to visualize as president. "Does Elizabeth Warren . . . cross some kind of experience threshold, a presidential threshold? ... Read more

Russell Brand: we deserve more from our democratic system
TheGuardian | Russell Brand | 11/05/13

The people who liked the interview said it was because I'd articulated what they were thinking. I recognise this. God knows I'd love to think the attention was about me but I said nothing new or original, it was the expression of the knowledge that democracy is irrelevant that resonated. As long as the priorities of those in government remain the interests of big business, rather than the people they were elected to serve, the impact of voting is negligible and it is our responsibility to be more active if we want real change. ... Read more

Philippines Typhoon: Year's Strongest Storm Haiyan Makes Landfall
HP | Oliver Teves | 11/08/13

One of the strongest storms on record slammed into the central Philippines on Friday, killing at least four people, forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes and knocking out power and communications in several provinces. But the nation appeared to avoid a major disaster because the rapidly moving typhoon blew away before wreaking more damage, officials said.

Weather officials said Haiyan had sustained winds of 235 kph (147 mph) with gusts of 275 kph (170 mph) when it made landfall. That makes it the world's strongest typhoon this year, said Aldczar Aurelio of the government's weather bureau. ... Read more
Typhoon Sea Rescues Haiyan Catastrophic Storm Of Massive Destruction (11/08/13) [2:11]

Which of the 11 American nations do you live in?
WashingtonPost | Reid Wilson | 11/08/13

We Sent Them to Brutal Wars: Now, the Untold Story Of What Happens When Soldiers Come Home
AlterNet | Ann Jones | 11/06/13

Jones' new book takes us on a powerful journey from the devastating moment an American soldier is first wounded in rural Afghanistan to his return home for recovery. This excerpt picks up at Ann Jones' visit to Craig Hospital, a Level III Trauma Center at Bagram Airforce Base in Afghanistan.

... His first surgical patient, three days after he arrived at Bagram, was a young soldier who had stepped on an IED, triggering an upward blast that destroyed his legs and left his pelvic cavity "hollowed out." His urinary system was in shreds. His testicles were destroyed. His penis was attached to his body by only "a little thread of skin." That first surgery, the doctor said, was "emotional" for everyone on the surgical team. "The others hadn't seen anything like these injuries for a while," he said, "and I had never seen anything like it. To have to amputate that boy's penis and watch it go into the surgical waste container--it was emotional." ... Read more

Chomsky: Why the Rest of the World No Longer Wants to be Like U.S.
AlterNet | Noam Chomsky | 11/05/13

During the latest episode of the Washington farce that has astonished a bemused world, a Chinese commentator wrote that if the United States cannot be a responsible member of the world system, perhaps the world should become "de-Americanized" -- and separate itself from the rogue state that is the reigning military power but is losing credibility in other domains.

The Washington debacle's immediate source was the sharp shift to the right among the political class. In the past, the U.S. has sometimes been described sardonically -- but not inaccurately -- as a one-party state: the business party, with two factions called Democrats and Republicans.

That is no longer true. The U.S. is still a one-party state, the business party. But it only has one faction: moderate Republicans, now called New Democrats (as the U.S. Congressional coalition styles itself). ... Read more

Bill Moyers: The Corporate Plot That Obama and Corporate Lobbyists Don't Want You to Know
TPP - zoom
AlterNet | Bill Moyers |11/01/13

... The pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is deliberately shrouded in secrecy, a trade deal powerful people, including President Obama, don't want you to know about. More than 130 members of Congress have asked the White House for greater transparency about the negotiations and were essentially told to go fly a kite. While most of us are in the dark about the contents of the deal, which Obama aims to seal by year end, corporate lobbyists are in the know about what it contains.

And some vigilant independent watchdogs are tracking the negotiations with sources they trust, including Dean Baker and Yves Smith, who join Moyers & Company this week. Both have written extensively about the TPP and tell Bill the pact actually has very little to do with free trade. ... Read more

Inside the 'ALEC Universe'
ALEC - zoom
Bill Moyers | Theresa Riley | 08/15/13

Representative Chris Taylor is a Democrat elected to the Wisconsin legislature in 2011. Last week, she attended the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) annual conference in Chicago. Writing about her experience at The Progressive magazine's website, she describes her experience inside the "ALEC universe" and writes: "ALEC members have been quietly working out of the public eye to develop their agenda so that when given the opportunity, they are ready to start creating an ALEC nation. That time has come. And they are ready." ... Read more

Inside the Dark Money-Fueled, 50-State Campaign Against American Workers
Bill Moyers | Joshua Holland | 11/05/13

"The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011--2012" reveals the existence of a multifaceted, nationwide campaign to not only deprive working people of the right to join a union, but also keep wages low and make it harder for people to take their employers to court when they've been wronged.

The Interview:
Joshua Holland: Your report looks at a wide array of state laws -- passed or proposed -- that undermined workers' rights in 2011 and 2012. You say that this is an unprecedented assault on working people. ...

... Joshua Holland: You made another important point, which is that a lot of people in these states think that these laws are being pushed by their local lawmakers. And in fact, when you dug into this issue, you saw the same legislation popping up in state after state after state. Who is behind this?

Lafer: Right. The American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, writes model laws. They'll have five or six different model laws about the same thing that are kind of calibrated to see what can pass in a given state at a given time. So on minimum wage, their end goal is to have there be no minimum wage at all, and they have a bill that says abolish the minimum wage, but, well, if you can't pass that, at least don't increase it in a way that's linked to the rate of inflation and goes up every year. So we see, in every state, people experience these as if they come from their local legislator or as if they're a response to the particular problems in their state, and in fact, the laws are being written largely by ALEC.

And if you look behind ALEC -- and all of this stuff is available to the public because there is a member of ALEC who was a whistle-blower and dumped a lot of the information that was supposed to be kept secret from the public out in the public domain -- there's a website called ALECexposed.org where you can see all the model bills. But if you look at the member companies behind them, it's a bunch of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the country. They work through ALEC, but they also work through the Chamber of Commerce and the Restaurant Association and a bunch of other business lobbies. And what we see is the same corporations are helping write the law, are funding the campaigns of the candidates, are funding state-level corporate-backed think tanks that put out white papers and talking points and offer talking heads to go on TV, and then they spend the unlimited money on ads on radio and TV. It's a very well-coordinated campaign. ... Read more

Half Of The World's Richest People Come From Just 2 Families
HP | author | 11/1105/13

Here's a fact that will make any liberal cringe.   Seven of the 12 richest people in the world have names ending in Koch, Walton or Adelson, according to a new calculation by Bloomberg Markets magazine.

Of course, extreme wealth gives you a lot of political power. Here's how these folks wield their influence:

The 'toxic monster' is coming! Texas-sized floating island containing one million tonnes of junk from Japan tsunami drifting towards US
independent.co.uk | John Hall | 11/06/13

An enormous floating island of debris from Japan's 2011 tsunami is drifting towards the coast of America, bringing with it over one million tonnes of junk that would cover an area the size of Texas.

The most concentrated stretch -- dubbed the "toxic monster" by Fox News - is currently around 1,700 miles off the coast, sitting between Hawaii and California, but several million tonnes of additional debris remains scattered across the Pacific. ... Read more

Toxic Monster - zoom

Fuel Rod Removal Attempt at Fukushima Unit 4 Delayed, Possibly for Weeks
fukushimaupdate.com | ENE News | 11/05/13

The utility had intended to start removing the fuel rods from the unit's packed cooling pool as early as Friday.

... The building housing the No. 4 reactor and the storage pool, however, was hit by fires and a hydrogen explosion after the station lost power, disrupting the pool's cooling system. More than 1,300 spent fuel assemblies and more than 200 fresh ones, including some containing plutonium-infused mixed-oxide fuel, remain in the pool. ... Read more

The Intent Beneath the Sirius Documentary
HP | Denise M. Wilbanks | 05/08/13 older

For centuries, we have been conditioned with the axiom, "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck," but is it really a duck every single time? We live under a dense veil of "illusion" forcing us to operate under the auspices that our socioeconomic conditions are the direct result of our collective doing. This is not entirely so.

Last week I had the privilege of conducting an exclusive interview with Dr. Steven Greer, founder of the Center for Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) established in 1990. Dr. Greer also spearheaded the Disclosure Project, a research initiative working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence and classified advanced energy propulsion systems. This project has proven to reveal much more than it set out to discover. ... Read more

Naomi Klein: Why Science Is Telling All of Us to Revolt and Change Our Lives Before We Destroy the Planet
AlterNet | Naomi Klein | 10/29/13

But it was Werner's own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled "Is Earth F**ked?" (full title: "Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism").

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that "earth-human systems" are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the "are we f**ked" question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, "More or less." ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Wednesday, November 06 [11:27]

Jon Stewart | President Obama qualifies his formerly definitive statements regarding the Affordable Care Act, and his opponents lie like motherf**kers about its effects (11/05/13) [6:09]

'Sirius' (trailer) [2:20]

Tar Sands - Click to zoom
Tar Sands is a messy job

Fed's Bullard: Bubbles Are "Blindingly Obvious"
ZeroHedge | author | 11/04/13

In a stunning series of lies, damned lies, and twisted statistics, the Fed's Jim Bullard unleashed a torrent of self-agrandizing comfort-speak on CNBC this morning. From his comment that "bubbles, such as housing and dot-com, were blindingly obvious at the time," despite Bernanke's (and Greenspan's) insistence at the time that they were not.

Read more

How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood
AlterNet | Alyssa Bereznak | 11/04/13

... You might be familiar with Rand from a high school reading assignment. Perhaps a Tea Partyer acquaintance name-dropped her in a debate on individual rights. Or maybe you've heard the film adaptation of her magnum opus "Atlas Shrugged" is due out April 15. In short, she is a Russian-born American novelist who championed her self-taught philosophy of objectivism through her many works of fiction. Conservatives are known to praise her for her support of laissez-faire economics and meritocracy. Liberals tend to criticize her for being too simplistic. I know her more intimately as the woman whose philosophy dictates my father's every decision. ... Read more

Bill Moyers: The Corporate Plot That Obama and Corporate Lobbyists Don't Want You to Know About
AlterNet | Bill Moyers |11/01/13

... The pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is deliberately shrouded in secrecy, a trade deal powerful people, including President Obama, don't want you to know about. More than 130 members of Congress have asked the White House for greater transparency about the negotiations and were essentially told to go fly a kite. While most of us are in the dark about the contents of the deal, which Obama aims to seal by year end, corporate lobbyists are in the know about what it contains.

And some vigilant independent watchdogs are tracking the negotiations with sources they trust, including Dean Baker and Yves Smith, who join Moyers & Company this week. Both have written extensively about the TPP and tell Bill the pact actually has very little to do with free trade. ... Read more

Jaimie Alexander Shocks In Sheer Dress With No Underwear At 'Thor: The Dark World' Premiere
HP | author | 11/05/13

All eyes were on Jaimie Alexander when she arrived on the red carpet for the premiere of "Thor: The Dark World" in a totally sheer dress.
Read more

Who Buys the Spies? The Hidden Corporate Cash Behind America's Out-of-Control National Surveillance State
TRNN News | Thomas Ferguson | 10/23/13

In early June 2013, Glen Greenwald, then of the Guardian, with an assist from journalists at The Washington Post, electrified the world with stories drawn from documents and testimony from Edward Snowden, an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton working under contract with the National Security Agency, who had fled the country. They broke the news that the U.S. government had been collecting vast amounts of information on not only foreigners, but also American citizens. And the U.S. had been doing this for years with the cooperation of virtually all the leading firms in telecommunications, software, and high tech electronics, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Verizon, and Facebook. Sometimes the government even defrays their costs. ... Read more

No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.
NYTimes | Scott Shane | 11/02/13

... From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency's official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve "diplomatic advantage" over such allies as France and Germany and "economic advantage" over Japan and Brazil, among other countries. ... Read more

The Battle of the NSA Surveillance Bills
MotherJones | Dana Liebelson | 11/01/13

Privacy experts say that the FISA Improvements Act, which passed 11-4, codifies current surveillance practices instead of fixing the law to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans: "This was an opportunity for Congress to really recalibrate the statute, and it's very disappointing that they've used this opportunity to cement domestic spying programs instead," says Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU. ...

... Also worrisome to privacy experts is the fact that the bill expands the NSA's powers, by allowing the agency to track cellphone's of non-Americans believed to be located abroad for 72 hours after they enter the United States. The bill additionally levies a penalty of up to 10 years in prison on anyone who accesses NSA information without authorization, like Snowden did. ... Read more

5 Infuriating Quotes from Politicians About the NSA
Care2.com | Kevin Mathews | 11/02/13

	Representative Mike Rogers, Republican from Michigan "If the French citizens knew exactly what that was about, they would be applauding and popping champagne corks. It's a good thing."
	General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA "I think it's wrong that newspaper reporters have all these documents… and are selling them and giving them out… We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to do that. That's more of the courts and policymakers, but, from my perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on."
	Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina "I'm glad that the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country. I'm glad that activity is going on, but it is limited to tracking people who are suspected to be terrorists and who they may be talking to… Yes, I am sure that that's what they're doing."
	Representative Peter King, Republican from New York "The president should stop apologizing, stop being defensive. The reality is the NSA has saved thousand of lives -- not just in the United States, but also in France and Germany and throughout Europe."
	Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California "I am not a high-tech techie, but I have been told that is not possible." When Edward Snowden reported that he had the ability to wiretap anyone, Feinstein claimed that it couldn't be done. Feinstein provided Congressional oversight for the NSA, but didn't actually understand how any of it works. In essence, her role was to merely ask if the NSA was behaving and then relay what she was told. Talk about oversight

5 Ways Super-Rich Are Betraying America
AlterNet | Paul Buchheit | 11/03/13

As they accumulate more and more wealth, the very rich have less need for society. At the same time, they've convinced themselves that they made it on their own, and that contributing to societal needs is unfair to them. There is ample evidence that this small group of takers is giving up on the country that made it possible for them to build huge fortunes. ...

... Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot and member of the Forbes 400, had this to say about any American who might object to all the greed: "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?" ...

Be Very Afraid: The American Economy Is Cannibalizing Itself, and We the People Are Going to Pay a Huge Price
AlterNet | Robert Reich | 11/03/13

... The larger reality is that most Americans are still living in the Great Recession. Median household income continues to drop. In last week's Washington Post-ABC poll, 75 percent rated the state of the economy as "negative" or "poor."   So why is Washington whacking safety nets and services that a large portion of Americans need, when we still very much need them? ...

... It's not just that the top 10 percent have jobs and their wages are rising. The top 10 percent also owns 80 percent of the stock market. And the stock market is up a whopping 24 percent this year. ...

... Big corporations can also borrow at rock-bottom rates these days in order to buy back even more of their stock -- courtesy of the Fed's $85 billion a month bond-buying program. (Ichan also wants Apple to borrow $150 billion at 3 percent interest, in order to buy back more stock and further enrich himself.) ... Read more

Ender's Game (trailer) [2:07]

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, November 04 [13:46]

DN | Inside the "Electronic Omnivore": NSA Spying on U.N., Climate Summit, Text Messaging Worldwide (11/04/13) [7:32]

*UNMANNED: America's Drone Wars by Robert Greenwald (full) (10/28/13) [1:03:55]

*Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill

The Untold History Of The United States Episode 01 [58:00]

Beating The Bomb [1:12:22]

Nuclear Bombs expoded
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 (hint 2053) - by Isao Hashimoto [14:25]

TYT | God's Punishment For Abortion Is Global Warming?! (11/01/13) [8:54]

TYT | Hillary Clinton Gets BIG Paycheck From... (11/01/13) [7:26]

TYT | Atheists Insulted On Fox News Religion Panel (11/01/13) [4:14]

TYT | LAX Shooting Updates: TSA Workers Targeted, Anti-Government Note Found (11/01/13) [8:46]

TYT | What A Sexist Libertarian Thinks Of Women's Health Insurance (11/01/13) [7:06]

TYT | Christians vs. Atheists: Who's More Likely To Divorce? (11/01/13) [7:26]

TYT | Judge Upholds Ruthless Abortion Law - Federal Fight Looming? (11/01/13) [4:54]

TYT | Republican Senators Use Fake Scandal To Block Fed Chair Nominee (10/31/13) [7:54]

TYT | McCain Fires Back At Congressman Gohmert (10/30/13) [4:41]

TYT | Obama Said You Could Keep Your Insurance Plan But... (10/30/13) [9:21]

TYT | Oliver Stone Interview With Cenk Uygur (10/30/13) [23:30]

Thom Hartmann | Dear Senator Durbin: Social Security is Solvent! (10/23/13) [9:34]

Thom Hartmann | Congressman Peter DeFazio: Why Not a Flat Tax for Social Security? (10/23/13) [9:02]

Thom Hartmann | The Bengazi Hoax (10/23/13) [9:21]

Thom Hartmann | How the Koch Brothers Fleeced America (10/22/13) [7:10]

Thom Hartmann | Latest on Fukushima... (10/18/13) [8:30]

Thom Hartmann | Does Studying Economics Make you Greedy? (10/22/13) [8:30]

Thom Hartmann | There Are Some Things Government Can Do Better (10/22/13) [3:48]

John Kerry: NSA Spying Has 'Reached Too Far,' Was Happening 'On Autopilot'
HP | Chris Gentilviso | 11/01/13

Secretary of State John Kerry admitted Thursday that the NSA's surveillance programs have gone "too far" -- so much so that actions were occurring without knowledge from the Obama administration. ...

... "The president and I have learned of some things that have been happening in many ways on an automatic pilot, because the technology is there and the ability is there," he said, according to the Guardian. ... Read more

New Report: Homeland Security workers routinely boost pay with unearned overtime, report says
WashingtonPost | Emily Wax-Thibodeaux | 10/31/13

Federal employees at the Department of Homeland Security call it the "candy bowl," a pot of overtime money they have long dipped into to pad their pay even if they haven't earned it, whistleblowers say.

This practice, which can add up to 25 percent to a paycheck, has become so routine over the last generation that it's often held out as a perk when government managers try to recruit new employees, according to these accounts. ... Read more

The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Trade Agreement for Protectionists
TPP - Zoom
Bill Moyers | Dean Baker | 10/29/13

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) stands at the top of the Obama administration's trade agenda. The argument from its supporters is that this agreement is part of the never-ending quest for freer trade. The evidence from what we know of this (still secret) pact is that the TPP has little to do with free trade. It can more accurately be described as a pact designed to increase the wealth and power of crony capitalists.

At this point, with few exceptions, formal trade barriers, such as tariffs and quotas, are not very large. If lowering or eliminating the formal barriers that remain were the main agenda of this pact, there would be relatively little interest. Rather, the purpose of the pact is to use an international trade agreement to create a regulatory structure that is much more favorable to corporate interests than they would be able to get through the domestic political process in the United States and in the other countries in the pact. ... Read more

Harry Reid's Source On Mitt Romney's Taxes Was Jon Huntsman Sr., Book Claims
HP | Mollie Reilly | 10/31/13

The source behind Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) bold claim that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had paid "basically" no taxes for a decade was Jon Huntsman Sr., a new book on the 2012 campaign claims.

The New York Times on Thursday offered details from "Double Down: Game Change 2012," a behind-the-scenes account of the election by political reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Among the nuggets in the book is the reveal that Reid's source was Huntsman, a longtime backer of Romney. ... Read more

When Advertising is Lying?
Body Evolution - Model before and after [1:12]

And then there is just Make Believe
Heiti Klum transforms to old lady for Halloween [0:35]

Jon Stewart | Members of Congress pressure Kathleen Sebelius to join millions of Americans who break the law every day (10/31/13) [6:21]